• You can only paint the six museum locos but not any other and other rolling stock you own
  
• Items you install in any of your owned vehicles will remain, even if you clear it using the comms radio
  
• The spawn point of the wrecks is randomized on each save file
  
• A single station can spawn multiple wrecks at once

This guide may no longer be fully accurate since updates that change a few related things have been released

Any vehicle you own can be spawned at any point using the comms radio. The price is constant and not relevant to the distance which the vehicle has to be teleported.


Clearing your personal vehicles is free. If you clear a vehicle, it will be teleported back to its parking spot. For the demonstrator locos and the utility flatcar, this is the museum. For all others, this is the garage you unlocked them from.


Personal vehicles must be maintained and fueled manually. You cannot do this via the career manager, but you can use the career manager to get an overview of unpaid fees in the "owner vehicles menu"

Note: There is currently a bug that prevents you from paying off the emissions tax. This means your owned vehicles will indefinitely accumulate fees until this bug is fixed. However, because these fees are tracked separately, they should not interfer with taking jobs. When you print a fee report in the career manager and it shows no damage and no used resources, but still has an unpaid total, that would be emissions you currently can't pay.
This has been resolved

Gadgets can be installed in any vehicle, not just your own. Most gadgets require a mounting plate that matches its size, and it must be soldered in.


It may be difficult at first to find the correct plate size. Whether a rectangular or long plate is required can usually be seen by looking at the gadget, long gadgets need the long plates, more square ones need the rectangular mounting brackets.

To find out if a plate is the correct size, put it anywhere you want, then try to fit a gadget to it. If the gadget snaps into place and changes color, the plate is of correct size. If it doesn't snaps to it, the plate size is wrong. Until you screw the plates in you can click on them to remove them again.


All shops carry common items like mounting plates. All shops also carry a set of unique items.
Important shops:

• GF: tools you need to install and uninstall gadgets
  
• MF: Gadgets that change locomotive features and behavior (switch setter, anti wheelslip, etc.)

Gadgets will not prevent public locomotives from despawning. If they do despawn, all installed gadgets are uninstalled and teleported to the shack


Personal locomotives never despawn. At worst, you can manually clear them from the tracks, but this doesn't despawns them either, but merely moves them to their designated parking spot. Because they're not despawned ever, gadgets in rolling stock you own will remain installed.


There's a limit on the number of parts you can buy. Parts that are consumed when use will restock when you use them (the solder wire for example), but others will not. This puts a hard limit on how much stuff you can install in total across all locos because mounting plates are not considered consumed when you use them. As of this writing, the limit is way too low. There's 4 gadgets that need the small mounting plate (inclinometer, temperature gauge, speedometer, clock) but you can at most own 20 of these plates. Because of this, you currently cannot upgrade all cabs equally.

The large steam locomotive is considered to be two units, with the tender being separate from the locomotive itself. This means you cannot use the crimp tool to wire gadgets on the tender together with the locomotive


You can install a gadget multiple time in the same loco. For some of them this may seem unnecessary, but having a speedometer and a second switch setter mounted at the back of the cab can make shunting more comfortable.

Restoration always consists of the same steps:

Wrecks spawn randomly when a new game is created or an old save is migrated to the current version. The possible spawn locations are fixed, and one is chosen for each locomotive.

There's a guide on here that documents most locations with images if you struggle to discover them all.


After discovering it you must rerail it. The price depends on the distance, so it's recommended to rerail it to the closest track. The upper limit of the cost is 10'000 though.

Note: You need the appropriate operation license for the locomotive to recover it


Next you need to tow it to the museum. Make sure the handbrake is off before you do so. You don't have to lubricate the steam locomotives, because they are already 100% damaged.
The tow vehicle doesn't matters, but keep in mind that the railbus is very light and because of that doesn't has a lot of tractive effort. You may struggle to tow the 282 or DE6 with it.


After towing you must buy replacement components. The cash register in the museum office will have the price listed automatically. If you have multiple locos to restore you can buy all parts at once, but be aware that you can haul at most two of them at once, because only the railbus and the utility flatcar are able to haul them.
Pickup point is always the loading track in MF. Dropoff is the middle of the turntable. It may take a few seconds before the game realizes that you've delivered the components.

This step is somewhat monotonous because you're driving the exact same route from MF to CS six times. If this bothers you, you can cut the driven distance in half by spawning the railbus on the loading track at MF instead of driving there manually.

After delivery you must pay at the museum office cash register for installation.


Next step is repairing and refueling. Simply tow the loco to the maintenance station in the museum and do so. This will be expensive because all resources will be at 0%. If the values are already partially full you're probably looking at the vehicle you used to tow, and you must use the knob on the leftmost green column to switch to the wreck.

Note about the 282 and 060: Water and coal is on the tracks next to the repair station. If you tow them there after repairing you want to lubricate them first or you will start damaging them again.
Also note that they need a ton of water for the initial boiler fill. They each take about 1½ full tenders of water to make it even appear in the glass tube. This takes a long time, so bring the game console, or paint them (see blow).

After the repair step, the vehicle is considered yours and is fully usable, and can be spawned and cleared with the comms radio


Painting is optional, and you will never get the rusty look back when you paint your locos, so think whether you want to or not. Painting is only possible on the 6 museum locos and not other rolling stock you own (yet). The painting table is next to the repair station, and this is also where you can pick up the paint gun. Left click on a sand/paint can to attach it, left click again to drop it when it's used up. One can is usable for exactly one complete step. You first must use the sand can to remove the old paint, then use a paint can (either DVRT from any shop, or demonstrator paint from the shop in MF) to paint the loco. You must do this twice, once for the exterior, and once for the cab. You're allowed to paint the cab different from the exterior.
The demonstrator can paints the loco in the special color scheme you find it with. The DVRT can paints it in the color scheme that you find standard locos in, but with a pristine look.

If you don't like the paint, you can strip it using a sand can at any time.

The paint gun works everywhere. It's not necessary to move the loco to the painting track. I recommend you paint your steam locos while the boiler is filling up. The tender of the S282 is considered a separate item, and you need an extra sand and paint can for it.
The game is smart enough to not break if you paint before fully repairing.

After you're done you can either manually park the loco, or clear it with the remote to have it done automatically for free.